Page 19 of Famous for a Living

I struggle to push each of the white hardcase suitcases along the airport hallway like a mother duck trying to keep her ducklings in line. People around me scurry past, casting dubious glances at the girl in the snow-white coat juggling coffee and a slew of white suitcases down a hallway bordered on each side by hanging furs behind glass displays and educational pictures of hardy Native Americans past and present.

I keep my gaze fixed on the suitcases in front of me as I move toward the entrance of the airport, daring to look neither to the right at the market with its display of magazines (and my face, no doubt) nor to the left, where floor-to-ceiling glass windows display the sheets of snow beyond.

I can do this.

I am a grown woman.

I am thirty years old.

I have dealt with far more technical things than dragging six suitcases through an airport.

I pause in the hall, spotting the could-be humorous angle of my little tow-along, and slip out my phone.

Lighthearted.

Innocent.

Postable.

Serena pushed me to start posting again on my accounts. I’d stopped, overwhelmed by the onslaught of hate, wanting to remove myself from the trampling of people who waited rabidly for new content every day. Hungry for fresh pictures and words to chew on and spit out and then point at with disgust. Eager to get a conversation going in my comments about how horrible I was while hundreds and thousands jumped in to agree. It seemed every post I made only made my situation worse.

But Serena rolled out a PowerPoint before I left (complete with laser pointer fashioned inside a bright-red pen), pointing to stats as she broke down the analytics of a dozen canceled high-profile influencers, analyzing how and why either their crash was permanent or they were able to crawl their way out. Ultimately, it came down to this: keep posting.

And be happy.

Pretend what is going on is not in fact going on.

Focus on as many “humble highlights” as possible I could garner in a day.

Make my captions as unoffensively happy and relatable to the general public as humanly possible.

Throw in the “hiked-five-miles-to-school-uphill” kind of stories from childhood. Share the Louboutin leather studded purse Christmas gift, yes, but be sure to do so with a caption of how special it is given my childhood spent in poverty.

Show the other side of me (as though living in a national park is actually another side of me), making them curious and zealous to follow along and find out what exactly I’m up to, winning them over with my “down-to-earth alter ego” and, most importantly, proving to the world that I’m not guilty.

Because, as Serena has said a thousand times, guilty people don’t carry on living life and sharing about it as though they were innocent (except for the stray psychopath).

Guilty people hole up when accused.

Innocent people shrug it off.

Guilty people stand in a rain shower while water drips down their umbrellas and strangers take pictures of them.

Innocent people go to bed with an easy conscience and demonstrate just how easy their conscience is by wearing sunny yellow sundresses and pointing out how pretty the flower in the cracked sidewalk is, all while comparing it to their lives.

So my job, aside from the literal job I took up with Uncle Terry, is to practice keeping on as usual. Just bright, and bubbly, and entirely unoffensive, and humble, and different.

I look at the line of suitcases from another angle—hearing the criticisms to come.

Who needs that many suitcases? Is that a Louisa Voeux? Just use an athletic bag like the rest of us humans.

Some people have real problems, sweetie.

It doesn’t matter that these were given to me. It doesn’t matter that this was—is—my livelihood. That my job was—is—to be a walking banner ad for these companies.

My confidence wavers. But Serena’s words prod me on. It’s this or hide altogether. I just have to press on.

At the last second I shift the angle of the camera.